Corvos
4mo ago
Yeah, I was thinking it’s very Toxoplasma of Rageish. Like, if I wanted to pick/manufacture the perfect heroine and villain for my long-planned rising, these aren’t the ones I’d choose.
An academic work and various articles I read 10 years ago when I was trying to write a novel on witchcraft. I'm afraid I don't recall the name but it was regarded as being the top work at the time.
My understanding was that the consensus had settled (note weasel words!) on 'most victims of witchcraft accusations were men, witch-burnings were much rarer than lyncings, witchcraft accusations are best thought of as spontaneous riots rather than having much to do with religion or politics'. But that's all I've got to back it.
The only thing I note about the article you linked is the first paragraph:
While both men and women have historically been accused of the malicious use of magic, only around 10–30% of suspected witches were men by the 16th and 17th centuries. (Emphasis mine)
Perhaps we are discussing different periods? Doesn't seem likely though. At the risk of going ad-hominem, I'll admit I have limited trust in a blog post by the University of Cambridge from 2023, whose main citation is an article in Gender & History. For myself I’m going to say that this is epistemically undetermined for now :)
Corvos
4mo ago
To go viral, one assumes. Then you sell the story, plus when you sell your services as a content creator you can point to when one of your videos was literally world famous, etc.
Corvos
4mo ago
The majority of people accused of witchcraft were men, and it wasn't organised, it was local disagreements and hatreds escalating into lynchings. These were almost always halted when anyone with any authority outside the village found out what was going on and put a stop to it.
Corvos
4mo ago
Gentlemen can buy knives, chavs can't. No need for ID. Class discrimination is what made Britain great.
Corvos
4mo ago
The transcript in that video is really weird, though. Her words are aggressive, but he keeps saying variations on, 'yes, yes, show the knife'.
It could be 'get the knife again, I want the world to see what you were threatening me with' but coupled with the weird way she's holding them (face on to the camera, maximum display, minimum threat) and his background as a 'digital artist' I would not be at all surprised if he's paying her.
Corvos
4mo ago
I was all ready to be impressed with the Mail for actually doing some investigative journalism & finding some facts, and then
Despite rabble rousers such as Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk suggesting that the man who filmed it was a small boat illegal migrant, we can reveal Fatos has lived in the UK for four years
Oh gosh. Four years. How could we be so mistaken?
Corvos
4mo ago
At least in the UK, things were kept reasonably orderly in part because the police were usually local and knew everybody, and because they were freer to make assumptions about who was up to no good.
When you have to apply the laws completely equally and show no evidence of prejudice, the laws are going to have to get a lot more onerous and specific.
Corvos
4mo ago
You joke, but I’ve known some very brown farm labourers. 60 years of all-day tanning with do a lot. Though they were Japanese and not super-pale to start with.
Corvos
4mo ago
You’re welcome. I hope it’s of some use. Keep buggering on, as Churchill used to say.
Corvos
4mo ago
I am terribly sorry for what has happened to you and your family, and I wish you all the best as the situation develops.
I wonder if you would find it helpful to read VALIS by Philip K Dick, the famous science fiction author, who began experiencing mystical/schizophrenic delusions in his later life.
The book is a very thinly veiled exploration of Dick’s own mental state, and his constant struggle to reconcile his rational understanding that he is deluded with his schizophrenic certainty that all of it is true.
I haven’t read it for a long time but you might find it illuminating or humanising.
Corvos
4mo ago
Scottish cities have long had a bad reputation for a reason. If a girl is going around with a knife in a Scottish city, she’s probably not someone you want to meet.
2-1 I’ll give you.
Corvos
4mo ago
Charles II managed just fine, although admittedly his coup-d'etat was done from afar and not necessarily under his aegis. The trick is to let people get a good, long look at the alternative and then to march in your armies when nobody can stomach fighting to defend the status quo.
Corvos
4mo ago
Nobody’s being obtuse. The claim
Disney was always for chicks, some people fell for a marketing ploy when they decided to chickify a couple boys IPs.
is IMO ahistorical and incorrect, and you haven’t made any attempt to back it up. Several people including me have said so and provided receipts, and you’ve spammed snark at them.
Corvos
4mo ago
There’s a tendency to simplify choices - ‘unfortunately we couldn’t keep this once-great thing neutral and now we have to oppose it’ becomes ‘it never had any redeeming qualities, it’s getting what it always deserved and if you think otherwise you’re not really one of us’.
Corvos
4mo ago
In some cultures this is of course the point - giving a gift is implicitly initiating a reciprocal relationship. And may be resisted for that reason.
Corvos
4mo ago
It’s hard to cleanly separate questions of value and questions of fact because our values influence what we think about the facts.
1000x this. Which to my mind is the true and valuable insight hidden at the heart of post-modernism.
Corvos
4mo ago
But "are tariffs good for the country?" is largely an object-level question. Proponents and opponents have identical definitions of what it being "good" would look like (i.e. increased prosperity in the long term); they simply have a factual disagreement on whether tariffs will achieve that end.
But for example if free trade increased the overall prosperity of the country 10% and the financial district 200% whilst the prosperity of blue collar workers and those in the rust belt heavily decreases, ‘good for the country’ again becomes a little tricky. Especially if you start to consider the second-order effects of this policy on the finances, social structure and industry of the country.
Corvos
4mo ago
The Lion King? The Jungle Book? The Emperor’s New Groove? Aladdin?
Aristocats is more borderline but the American audience is mostly intended to identity with the chirpy working-class American-accented tomcat rather than the beautiful English-accented heroine IMO.
Corvos
4mo ago
He converted at 31 or 33 years old.
Source: https://www.cslewisinstitute.org/resources/the-most-reluctant-convert/
But I would say both serious atheism and serious faith were relatively rare for intellectuals at that time. The majority being cultural Christians, if you like.
I don't really know anything about the history of Britain in Afghanistan, but it's worth noting that the Empire tended to operate on the Roman model - the incoming Brits put and keep an appropriate member of the local royal caste on the throne, we help keep things orderly, we invest to some extent and we make various rather one-sided trade deals.
The Americans (and probably the USSR) were hamstrung by being explicit regime-changers rather than 'you can keep things basically the same as they were, with us technically on top but generally hands-off'.
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